The mistake WikiLeaks made

I admire Julian Assange greatly. As the CEO of a company that provides services to Bloggers, I have seen first hand the good that free speech does. I believe that freedom of the press and freedom of speech is perhaps the greatest contributor to the success of the experiment that is the United States and many other countries that allow transparency.

I grew up in South Africa during Apartheid and witnessed first hand the evil that an opaque government perpetrates. It seems power without accountability inevitably leads to great evil.

I wholeheartedly supported Wikileaks disclosure of the Iraq footage of the death of Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen. I support the disclosure of the entire trove of diplomatic cables, even though most of the cables are not items of public interest - the test that traditional news organizations apply in deciding whether to disclose sensitive material.

Recently Julian and his organization said that they would release internal material that would sink a major US bank. The implication is clear: Wikileaks target's are not limited to governments. Corporations are fair game too.

In making this decision, Wikileaks lost many of their remaining friends with power. I'm not advocating whether or not this was the morally correct decision to make, but I would like to point out that it was a strategic blunder.

Since then Amazon have booted Wikileaks off their servers days after allowing them on. Today Paypal suspended their account.

While these events are quite probably unrelated to Wikileaks targeting corporations, it's unlikely that the executives in these companies would go out of their way to help Wikileaks after the organization has made it clear that corporations are fair game.

I recently had the pleasure of debating the wikileaks situation with a friend who has spent his entire career in Aerospace protecting government secrets. We agreed to disagree on the level of transparency that is acceptable. But he asked me how I would react if my intellectual property was published by Wikileaks. At the time I said that I would target the individuals who stole the IP and would leave Wikileaks alone. When Julian Assange made the announcement that he's targeting US companies I suddenly found myself emotionally engaged in the argument and discovered that I felt differently. I felt that organizations like Wikileaks could threaten my family's livelihood and that of my employees.

I tend to err on the side of maximum transparency. But I think that by targeting corporations, wikileaks has lost a critical source of support in the important work they're doing.

I'd like to hear how startup CEO's and executives on HN feel about wikileaks from a business perspective.

~torq